The Deeper Game of Pokémon, or, How the world’s biggest RPG inadvertently teaches 21st century kids everything they need to know

Eli Neiburger

1. Introduction

So, is Pokémon really that big of a deal? Yes, it is really that big of a deal. 200 million units sold, only the Plumber is bigger, and even runaway hit franchises like Halo or Madden can only dream of success on this scale. Most of these players are future adults, and the franchise ensnares their little minds with not just the narcotic Japanese adorableness of this little fleet of collectible fluffy ideas, but with a nearly bottomless gameplay, offering young players the opportunity to find out exactly how deep the rabbit hole goes… but almost entirely outside the game world.

While not discounting the masterful management of the property for Nintendo by The Pokémon Company, a big part of the enduring appeal is the slowly increasing complexity of the dynamics underneath the relatively simple and fixed surface gameplay, as well as a steady trickle of new creatures and features. Balancing this ever-deepening knowledge space with a front end that remains extremely accessible and inviting is a goal that few franchises attain; part of Pokémon’s perennial success is due to the fact that each new release is devoured by the hardcore fans as readily as it encourages new fans to take the first step.

Pokémon is so big with so many kids, across its various formats, media, and series, that many adults can’t help but look at it as some new hot impenetrable craze that these kids are into, and it snares them so deeply it must be because it’s narcotic and nefarious, leading innocent children to commit crimes against culture and tradition such as naming the family dog Squirtle or other atrocities. On the lists of things banned from many elementary school classrooms, along with weapons, drugs, and cell phones, are Pokémon cards. While it’s understandable that something so much more interesting than the curriculum would get a chilly reception from the teacher, it’s an unfortunate perception because Pokémon is a powerful learning tool, far deeper and robust as a learning mechanism than the educational technologies normally found in a classroom.

Pokémon teaches some obvious things; one of the most powerful impacts, frequently overlooked by disapproving teachers and librarians, is that Pokémon is an outstanding literacy tutor. There are over 200,000 lines of text in a Pokémon cartridge and no voice or video; all the multiple layers of information that the players interact with through the game is plain old text, often with vocabulary far beyond grade level and ample opportunities to immediately apply the information gained through text parsing, one of the critical literacy building loops. And unlike the assigned curriculum, Pokémon players actually want to read and understand every single line of dialogue that every single player, terminal, or talking signpost says as they never know where critical information will be hidden.

In addition to being such a literacy driver, Pokémon is a very positive example of how to compete with grace and sportsmanship, what winning and losing really mean (not much), and how to balance risk and reward. Primarily, engaging in battles against other players risks nothing other than honor; the player’s game save is unaffected by either a win or a loss. This sets up a low risk environment so that players are more willing to experiment, take chances, and go for the brass ring, with the option of trying it again and again if need be. Allowing kids to try challenging tasks repeatedly until they find success is not a common experience in today’s test-driven schools.

However, the real power of Pokémon is that far beyond these benefits, the very fabric and gameplay of the series stretches young minds in exactly the directions they most need to be stretched, and that their 20th-century styled educations barely even poke, as they are required to actively subsume large bodies of abstract knowledge through play and experimentation (supplemented with online resources) and build a ready working knowledge of a complex and hidden set of rules. Most tellingly, the primary learning task of excelling at Pokémon is not to memorize as much as you can, but to learn which bits of knowledge you’d better have in your head, and which can safely be stored on the net, in your pocket, at your fingertips. As ubiquitous internet access continues to change our society, this skill, being able to subconsciously determine which facts must be stored onboard and which can be left in our extended knowledge corpus, is likely to become a prerequisite for success in technical work (if it isn’t already) and it’s safe to say that this is not a focus in most elementary schools.

In addition, the act of learning, researching, and playing Pokémon leads to emergent behaviors that take the gameplay far beyond the limits of their tiny screens as kids are drawn to do complex analysis, arrive at consensus, and quickly access the knowledge available in other heads, all while cheering each other on and encouraging originality. Most compellingly, the Pokémon world gives kids a model for how science is done by allowing them to participate in a world where graspable new in-world science is actually being done, theorized, argued about, proven, and documented, among a community where credentials are irrelevant and only reputation and accuracy are prized.

While not every kid plays Pokémon, just as it used to be a safe bet that the kid with the Chemistry Set or the Soldering Iron (back when kids were allowed to have things like Chemistry Sets and Soldering Irons) will find a career in science, the kids who are drawn into the bottomless complexity of the Pokémon universe are likely the Scientists, Engineers, and Programmers of tomorrow, and the institutions they build to support the dissemination of the new science that happens within their beloved game worlds will set their expectations for how business and science are conducted online as adults for the rest of this century. These are the minds of the future. There’s a lot at stake. Fortunately, Pikachu is on the case.

2. Knowledge Spaces

A big part of the reason that Pokémon is not very popular with grownups is that our ossified 20th century brains aren’t quite up to the task of soaking it all in to the point that true proficiency would require. Of course, we also lack the single-minded enthusiasm of youth that allows a young mind to easily chase each thread of knowledge out to the end and see what else it’s tied to along the way. When a kid is getting into Pokémon, their first advantage is that they’re not immediately cowed by the scope of the gameworld, and their second advantage is that their supple young brains can easily stretch to store the barrage of multilayered knowledge that lies within.

There are so many Pokémon, places, objects, people, moves, modifiers, traditions, challenges and rewards, but they all collapse down to an approachable set of good and bad actions in a battle engine that has changed very little over the years of the series. The core of success and failure is the type matchup table, where each of the 17 types of Pokémon and attacks combine to determine the efficacy of an attack. Each Pokémon has one or two types, and each attack is one type; an attack can have one of 6 levels of efficacy depending on the types of its target. That’s a 3-dimensional knowledge matrix with over 4,600 cells, and each of the cells with 1 of 6 potential values; making a space with over 23,000 incorrect possible values and 4,624 correct values. On the surface, the more of this matrix you can hold in your head, the better you will perform in battle. But some type matchups are exceedingly rare, and some never legitimately appear, making some cells of critical importance and some of no importance. The game of learning this table is knowing what you need to know and what is safe to look up if it ever comes up… but then finding that that distinction is irrelevant because you went and retained it all without even trying to.

Of course, this specific knowledge is unlikely to be useful to a player’s future career (unless they pursue a Pokémon profession), but the ability to handle a dataset of this complexity and dimensionality while accounting for the varying importance of individual values will be a critical skill for a wide range of 21st century careers.

While Pokémon players, like all gamers, make a mental map of the game’s knowledge space as they play, going beyond the surface of the battle interface and results reveals a deeper world of knowledge that, while almost completely hidden to the casual player, is essential to succeeding against elite players who may have already reached the heady echelons of Middle School. For a beginning Pokémon player, being asked “Have you heard of EV training?” is likely to be the first Morpheus moment of their young lives, and if they are intrigued, and curiosity leads them to choose the red pill, they will truly discover how deep the rabbit hole goes.

EV (Effort Value) training determines what a Pokémon’s stats will be when it reaches max level 100, meaning that an EV-trained level 100 Charizard will kick the fiery ass of a noob-trained level 100 Charizard. EV training involves picking the XP-earning battles that you expose your Pokémon to carefully, and fully understanding the interplay of each Pokémon’s mysterious Nature (there are 25 different natures that affect base stats, but also interplay with how a Pokémon is treated) to ensure that your Pokémon reaches its fullest potential. EV training requires extensive out-of-game recordkeeping as no part of the game’s interface reveals anything about the EV progress your protégé may or may not be making. Discovering this arcane but critical knowledge is the first step into a larger world that says to kids, there is more, just beneath the surface, and you can understand it and use it to your advantage; just read this.

Pokémon is also a Global phenomenon (although limited to the types of places where kids have Nintendo handhelds or playing cards in their pockets) and while the wordplay-inspired names of Pokémon may be different in other territories, the numbers and many of the terms are international, even transcultural; kids can often play a robust Pokémon match even if they have no language in common and their cartridges come from different regions. There are Pokémon Wikis in 8 languages that have joined forces to become an Encyclopaediae Pokémonis; the English version, Bulbapedia, has over 16,000 articles.

One of the ways that the game world differs from the real world is that it is periodically and unmissably enlarged when a new game comes out. Of course the fans count down the days and hours, but the most inspiring part is the flurry of edits and fora activity as players race to discover the secrets of the new domain, be the first to confirm a rumor, document evidence in support of a theory, or just fill in a detail in the shared knowledge space that somebody missed. It’s akin to medicine discovering a new organ to study every 2 years; the resulting explosions of shared theory, evidence, and knowledge are experiences few modern scientists will have had in their disciplines.

Most positively, even a kid who knows they know everything about Pokémon knows they don’t know everything about Pokémon. With experimental conditions easily reproducible, there’s little room for Dogma. Either’s it’s reproducible truth or it’s just something somebody said, and with the steady growth of the knowledge space, it’s a rare Pokémon player who will completely dismiss an assertion made by a fellow player who has proven themselves to be credible. Pokémon teaches kids that there is always more to know in a way that fills them with anticipation instead of dread, and it’s critical for 21st century minds to feel this way about knowledge.

And the best part is that it’s all just a side effect of pursuing the most entertaining, engrossing, satisfying gaming experience possible; these games are not intended to be educational. And thank goodness, because wouldn’t that just SUCK? Part of the success is due to the slow reveal of the depth to new players; the player needs to know very little to have success as a beginner. Nobody ever tried Pokémon and put it down, saying it was too complex (except for adults). Pokémon teaches kids that learning more every day is fun, and that’s unfortunately a very rare lesson in the classroom.

3. Knowledge Acquisition

Here’s the most telling part of the Pokémon player’s experience: they learn and apply all this knowledge with not a single lecture, textbook, quiz, project or report card. They learn it because it is challenging, engaging, and immediately actionable. Not even the most dedicated Pokémon players study the game; they just play more. Play is study. Our educational systems are built around Play and Study being polar opposites, and you only get the Play when you’ve slogged through the Study. The amount of information the kids absorb into their little heads in the course of simply playing this game is astounding, especially when you consider how slowly the game itself dribbles out information to make sure a wide range of players can keep up.

This actually helps the knowledge acquisition process along, because most kids rapidly want to know more about the game than the game is ready to reveal, leading more experienced players to be a critical resource without the baggage of a generation leap as looking to experience often requires. That said, no kids sit together and go over each Pokémon, with the master patiently reviewing each detail for the noob; instead the knowledge sharing is about what game knowledge is most important to success, directing attention to the less obvious aspects of the game that are key to success, then allowing the newbie to absorb the data as they play, leading up to the moment when the Red and Blue pills are offered.

One of the most striking aspects of Pokémon culture is that despite the intense competition, there is no spreading disinformation, no withholding of critical knowledge, and no proprietary ideas. Because the entire world is so meticulously and authoritatively documented on the web, any subterfuge would quickly be discovered at a massive reputational cost to the player. The Pokémon ethos makes it very clear that keeping secrets about the world is something that only bad
guys do.

As a result, Pokémon knowledge is truly social knowledge; it’s clear to every player at a tournament that the entire room of players knows much more about Pokémon than any single player in the room, and the more quickly questions can flit from head to head, the more quickly the head that contains the answer with a high degree of certainly will be located and tapped.

It’s not that there are no tests, no success and no failure for the Pokémon player, quite the opposite regardless of whether they’re playing the single player campaign or playing against other humans, but the challenges are structured to have very very little risk and ample opportunity for learning. Beating a gym leader in the single player campaigns requires the player to learn enough about their style and their Pokémon to find a weakness and turn the tide of battle, and they can try it as many times as they need to. It’s not that you never forget your first gym battle; you never forget any of your gym battles.

In addition to the gameplay experience, the Pokémon web offers such a huge body of text to rely on to extend the social learning, which drives interest in, and understanding of, online research, with a critical awareness of source quality. A forum post is not authoritative, but the community wikis or the writings of Talmudic scholars certainly are, complete with nearly divine, legendary sources that are fabled to have connections on the dev team.

This is important, because the Pokémon universe has an almost completely silent creator in The Pokémon Company, one that only speaks in marketingese and never says a single thing about the deeper aspects of the game. All that’s known about that is the result of player theorization, experimentation, and documentation, often including elaborate tools and reference sources. At the same time, unlike the real world of science, the Pokémon universe is solely made of fully readable byte code for players who have the time, the tools, and the desire to examine the very fabric of their universe in its entirety. While only the most dedicated and patient enthusiasts can perceive the universe at this level, they report back volumes about what they discover, with complex analysis of the implications of this knowledge.

4. Knowledge Analysis

Even EV training is just the tip of the iceberg; understanding and applying knowledge about the Pokémon battle system is what separates the rookies from the masters. In addition to the authoritative wikis, there are several prominent sites that do detailed analysis on the huge possibility space that a Pokémon battle contains to condense the endless options into a set of best practices.

However, exactly how some of this information came into the hands of these scholars is shrouded in mystery and legend. It’s believed that Serebii.net, the definitive source on information about EV training, was given some information by the developers, presumably with the expectation that it would be leaked, explored and dissected. There’s no analog for this in the real world, unless you count inspiration delivered by Niels Bohr in a dream or the equivalent; a rare flash of insight that allows entire networks of mysteries to be unraveled.

While the leak, if it actually happened, rapidly advanced the science of Pokémon training, it’s a law of gaming that everything that can be known about a game will eventually be known, inferring that the leak was intended to jumpstart the deeper analysis of the game and give older, more experienced players a whole new way to play the game that they could then evangelize to the little kids who were mystified by their powers.

At the same time, most of the game knowledge space is defined above the surface, in the menus and screens, in such a way that even a casual player can at least understand how much information there is that can be known. This provides an opportunity for players to get in on the act of collecting data, reproducing and verifying experiments, and filling in the well-understood blanks of the items, places, people, shows, and monsters that make up the world.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the flurry of edit activity on the canonical wikis in the months leading up to, and following the release of, a new title in the series. In the 4 months bracketing the Japanese release of Pokémon Black & White, the English-language Bulbapedia had (X) edits contributed.

Being a part of this process necessitates a solid understanding of the game knowledge space, external recordkeeping, and an appreciation of wiki etiquette; again, not projects kids of these ages are likely to tackle as part of a school assignment. The scope of the opportunity is made clear by official sources, such as formal announcements of new Pokémon, surface gameplay aspects, or advertised new features. Players can then jump in and start filling in the blanks.

Of course, the whole point of this knowledge is to succeed in as many battle situations as possible, and the pursuit of the ideal Pokémon team versatility drives deep analysis and optimization, complete with lineup-engineering-specific terminology like “sweeper” and “wall” and such. In addition, like many other games, the Pokémon scholars often develop consensus-oriented “tiers” of Pokémon to establish the fundamental worth of each Pokémon’s individual possibility space.

Succeeding in competitive play essentially requires the extension of the gameplay beyond the DS and onto external tools, both universal, such as EV calculators, and special-purpose, such as Lineup analyzers that draw on agreed-upon measures of Pokémon’s versatility.

In addition to these player-created analytical tools, players have also created online battle simulators and battle simulator networks that allow you to enter any starting conditions and lineup to try out your theories using a reverse-engineered battle process that behaves just like the real thing; in essence, a battle modeler, free to download.

Of course, all knowledge has its dark practitioners, and there is a great deal of hacking activity in the Pokémon world, complete with players who think that anything goes and others that find it an abhorrent practice. Because hacking devices like the Action Replay are sold at retail, many parents will simply purchase the tools without understanding or really caring what it means for their kids to send an artificially-juiced Pokémon into battle against a carefully raised organic free-range specimen.

This touches on the fact that Pokémon encourages kids to confront issues of Digital Ethics and the consequences of cheating in a much more nuanced way, thick with implications that their parents do not understand, with the only knowledgeable role models available to model good behavior as a Pokémon trainer being their own peers or slightly older posters on fora that no adult ever visits.

In short, it’s safe to assume that when a Pokémon player is deciding what move to use next, they’re doing more sophisticated thinking and applying deeper analysis when they’re playing Pokémon than they ever do at school.

5. Knowledge Creation

It’s hard to find real-word analogues of the phenomenon that the Pokémon world goes through when a new title drops. There have been breakthroughs that open up entirely new realms of science before (something like the double-slit experiment comes to mind) but they don’t usually have countdown timers that allow all the players to clear their schedules and just know that they’ll be researching the new domain of their expertise that month.

While it would normally be a stretch to consider all the text that happens about a popular game, including walkthroughs, tables, and FAQs to be a part of the gameplay, it’s hard to separate out the activities that are required to keep the Pokémon world fully documented and discretely knowable from the highest levels of the gameplay itself. In fact, around the releases, it’s clear that a considerable contingent of serious Pokémon players are more interested in being the first to formally document or confirm some new fact than in playing the game itself, making the knowledge creation a extended part of the gameplay of the series, and even another opportunity to attempt to express dominance.

Players understand, of course, that participating in the creation and refinement of reference materials about the game world is an optional activity; but it’s clear that consuming the output of the contributors is not optional if you want your Pokémon to reach their fullest potential. This tilts the activities that happen outside the game towards a multiplayer model that encourages specialization and recognizes that the battle can only be won if you find your job and do it right. And again, while it may be a stretch to call these activities gameplay, it is clear that the play is happening on two levels; the surface battles with their attacks and items and statuses and winners and losers, and the collective action of the player community to achieve social mastery and grok each title in fullness, no matter how deeply the creators have obfuscated the game’s true nature.

Along the way, the players are building tools, calculators, spreadsheets, standardized terminology, and databases that support the knowledge game and make the tools of the trade freely available to all players. The ubiquity of these tools (and of the games themselves) make it much easier for experiments to be reproduced and theories tested. This makes it much, much harder to perpetrate a hoax or spread disinformation in the community because the reputation hit would be so great if a player or site was found to be acting in bad faith. And a higher reputation weight and little room to argue over initial conditions, leads to trust networks growing more quickly because everyone knows that everything is being checked and would be quickly exposed if untrue.

So, as the trust networks expand, less original work needs to be repeated, allowing for greater specialization throughout the community and very short lives for competing theories. While every fora’s denizens leap to defend attacks against their expertise, the fact is that a theory that is demonstratably untrue has a brutally short life in the Pokémon universe, and it goes without saying that nobody is interested in teaching any controversy.

Like other big titles, the fan consensus becomes a major component of the game, as player-created rankings and analyses make objective judgments about different strategies or lineups, leading players to insist on things like “Uber Bans” to prohibit the most powerful Pokémon or setting up Low Tier tournaments, using only the Pokémon that the community has judged the weakest to shake things up.

Again, the frequent drops of new titles, combined with an amazingly consistent and meticulously tended-to canon, leads to plenty of opportunity for players to get involved with knowledge creation. Even though not every player participates in this, they all understand that the body of knowledge is player-created, and there’s something transformative for you to feel that your most cherished reference tools were created by the collective actions of your peers instead of the deliberate actions of some impenetrable scholarly body. Most tellingly, it’s clear that all the print strategy guides are a joke, barely scratching the surface of the game and openly focusing on marketing over knowledge. For this generation, the only things that are printed are ads. At the same time, the player’s understanding of the ever-shortening loops between release of game and completion of fan analysis changes expectations about science, knowledge, and collective action in the future.

6. Conclusion

OK, so obviously, this is a bit of a love letter, but there’s never been anything as complex as this that kids have been expected to consume for fun. Most adults don’t do anything this complex for fun, although lots of them do things this complex for a job. Pokémon combines the stats hunger of sports worshippers, the nurturing models of Tamagotchis and their ancestors, the completist drive of the collector, the safe thrill of close, friendly matches with little on the line, and a bottomless rabbit hole of knowledge to make a cocktail that gives players super-powers of retention, recall, analysis and decision-making when consumed.

Not every kid plays it, but tens of millions do, and a great many of them are going to grow up to have technical jobs. It’s not that this is the only way that kids can prepare for a 21st century career, but I think you’re going to have a pretty hard time, come 2030 or so, finding a scientist (especially in biosciences) who wasn’t seriously into Pokémon as a kid.

The most amazing thing is that’s its all about the gameplay and the game mechanic, on the surface and below, and it’s inspiring that making something so complex and demanding should lead to essentially untouchable success in the marketplace. And yet this success makes it a target for controversy and misunderstanding. While school programs struggle to adapt to the 21st century, it’s unfortunate that such a powerful framework for learning, that requires research, collaboration, documentation, analysis, understanding of complex systems and development of advanced conceptual frameworks, is being forcibly set aside when it’s time to learn. Especially when it provides such a powerful and accessible model for how science is actually done, and the killer combo of no requirement to memorize facts, but a clear advantage in retaining them that leads to low-effort, experiential learning.

Just by pursuing commercial success, The Pokémon Company has built a world of knowledge and gameplay that spills over the confines of its tiny platform and rearranges fine young minds for the better, no matter how unreachable they may seem in the midst of a gym battle, and it’s likely that just as current scientists have been known to cite Star Wars or Star Trek for getting them inspired about science, scientists of the 21st century will devote entire chapters in their eMemoirs to Pokémon and the expanding influence the consuming gameplay had on their formative minds.